


Brother Swan

by Welfycat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: angst_bingo, Fairy Tales, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-16
Updated: 2011-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welfycat/pseuds/Welfycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series. One thing has always been the same about the Winchester brothers: they'll do anything to save each other.<br/>A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's <i>The Wild Swans</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Brother Swan

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Angst Bingo; Prompts: Fairy Tales & Folklore, Moments Lost, Mute, Tight Spaces  
> Content Notes: None.  
> Author Notes: A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's _The Wild Swans_  
>  Betaed by the fantastic race_the_ace.

The summer Sam Winchester turned 11 he spent almost entirely alone, almost entirely silent, and only saved by the fact that he knew Dean was alive.

John Winchester had disappeared on a long hunt as soon as school had finished, leaving enough money for them to pay rent as long as Dean kept the summer job at the garage only a few blocks away. Sam was only moderately resentful as it meant that he would have the summer mostly to himself, without his father demanding that he train with Dean or practice shooting or any number of things that Sam wasn't as interested in as he maybe should be. He didn't mind learning about the guns, or researching various mythologies - although his nightmares had been far more vivid since learning that most of the monsters he was reading about were actually real - or even learning about how to locate the monsters that they were hunting through newspapers and tabloids. But with Dean planning on being out of the long stay motel they were in for most of the day, all Sam had to worry about was making sure ends meet, because Dean wasn't particularly great at managing a budget, and how many books he could take out of the local library at a time.

This was all before Sam knew that there was a witch in the house at the end of the block. To Sam's credit, Dean didn't realize it either until after he'd been turned into a swan, even though Dean had more than a couple of years of knowing the hidden dangers of the world they lived in.

The first night when Dean didn't come home, Sam had figured that Dean had disappeared with a girl and that it served him right if Sam ate the entire can of Spaghetti-o's. The second day, when Sam walked over to the garage where Dean was supposed to be working, and learned that Dean hadn't been there yesterday, Sam had walked away before they could see the tears prickling at the back of his eyes. It took him the rest of that day and all the way until he couldn't keep his eyes open in the night to decide that Dean wouldn't have left him on his own. Something had happened to Dean, probably something bad, and Sam had to find out what it was. He fell asleep that night in the bed he usually shared with Dean, clinging to the revolver that Dad had bought Dean for his fourteenth birthday.

The next morning, Sam used every trick he'd learned from his brother to determine the last place Dean had been seen. He was half hoping that he was coming up against a non-human monster because he didn't know what he was going to do if it turned out his brother had been kidnapped like they sometimes talked about in school - stranger danger and not getting into cars with people you don't know. Dad's number one rule, and Dad had a lot of number one rules, was to stay away from the police, and Sam knew enough that if he went into a police station saying that his older brother had disappeared and he had no way to get in contact with his father, it wouldn't end well for anyone.

So it was with some relief that Sam saw Henbane, Nightshade and Datura growing in the side garden of a house that was on the way to the garage from the motel. Witches plants, something Sam had read about only a few months ago. A little bit of quiet reconnaissance, with Sam even more grateful that Dean had taught him how to pick locks at the start of the school year, and Sam was absolutely sure that Mrs. McCreeney was a witch, and not one of the silly new age witches who sat around naked and chanted about the powers of good. Of course, Sam wasn't too sure that those kinds of witches existed because he'd only heard about them from Dean and hadn't found any books to verify people actually did that.

After a careful investigation of Mrs. McCreeney's shrine and the books surrounding it, Sam was pretty sure he knew what had happened to his brother, though it didn't make him feel any better at all. That night he walked down to the water of the small river that ran nearby and sat down at the edge of the water. It was cold, though it was summer, and Sam fell asleep shivering in the tall grass.

He woke when he felt warmth surrounding him and found his brother pressed against his side.

"Dean," Sam sobbed, pressing his face against Dean's shoulder.

Dean held Sam, his body trembling. "I'm so sorry, Sammy. So sorry."

Sam couldn't say anything more through his tears and fell asleep with his brother holding him. When he woke up in the morning there was a bundle of rough feathers pressed against him and when it moved, its white wings stretching out into the sky, Sam knew that it was Dean. After making sure that Dean was safe in the water, Sam walked back to the motel room and managed to eat something and clean up a little before walking to the library and starting his research. There was, not surprisingly, very little information in the city library on how to turn his brother back into a human.

That night Sam went back down to the edge of the water and waited, falling asleep with his brother still in swan form next to him before the sun set.

Sam dreamt, a man - an angel - standing next to him in the woods with his hands glowing bright and dark wings stretched out above him. The instructions were clear enough: Sam was to make a shirt for his brother out of the nettles that grew in the nearby cemetery, and wasn't to speak a word to anyone, not even Dean, until the witches curse was broken.

When Sam woke, Dean was beside him once more in human form. Sam spent the night in his brother's arms, not saying anything but not falling back asleep until it was almost daybreak.

The next day, Sam went to the cemetery, just like it appeared in his dream, and began to pick the nettles, ignoring how tears ran down his face as they stung his hands and fingers. His hands were raw as he began to work the nettles into a thread that he would have to sew into a shirt. Sam wasn't much a seamstress but he understood the basic principle and had fixed enough shirts and socks of his own that he knew that he could do it. That night, Dean held Sam's hands and washed them in the water of the river, seeming to understand that Sam was doing what he had to in order to break the curse. They spent their nights like this, silent and hurting, but at least they were together.

A month and a half passed before Sam ran out of money. He'd stretched things as far as possible, stolen food when he had to, but there was no way he could continue to pay rent at the motel and no way that he could explain to the manager what had happened. The manager had tried to talk to him twice before, telling him to let his dad know that they needed to pay up, and then asking where his dad was, and then asking him about his hands. Sam had shrugged and ducked away, but knew that he wouldn't get another chance. The manager would probably call the police before too long, reporting him as being abandoned. Sam knew that if he was taken, getting back to Dean would be impossible and Sam wouldn't abandon Dean. The thread had been worked and the front of the shirt had been sewn. It wasn't exactly perfect, but it was the best that Sam could do with the skill he had. Sam gathered up everything from the motel and settled into the woods the best he could, making a shelter from the branches of a low tree and a tarp that he'd salvaged. Some days he shook from hunger and was driven out to find food, but for the most part he focused on working on Dean's shirt. Most days he couldn't even feel his hands anymore and had to go back in order to fix clumsy stitches that hadn't stayed.

Dean was with him most nights, though the nights he wasn't Sam sat up and worried and paced and rocked, wanting to scream but not daring to make a noise even if it wasn't words.

When he went into the fringes of the town to forage for food, he always made a point to check the date. Dad would be back the third week of August and if Sam didn't have Dean back by then, he wasn't sure that he would ever get him back at all, and he only had two weeks left. He caught a glimpse of himself in the window of the store one day, and was surprised to find his body stick thin and filthy and his hair long and wild. He didn't recognize himself anymore than someone would recognize the swan as Dean. Sam rushed back to the woods and went back to work, ignoring all the pain and the hunger and waiting desperately in hopes that Dean would come to the edge of the river that night.

Another week and a half passed and Sam carefully pieced together the parts of the shirt, his forearms stinging fresh as the rough fabric fell across his skin as he worked. He finally had a shirt that would fit Dean. He sat that night on the edge of the river and waited, used to staying awake late in the night until Dean either appeared or it was clear that he wouldn't come. It took two nights before Dean showed up again and Sam knelt in the mud just before sunset and placed the shirt carefully over Dean's long neck.

The transformation was instantaneous, Dean reappearing in the shirt and wrapping his arms tightly around Sam as they crouched at the edge of the river in the growing darkness. It wasn't until the next day that Sam realized that the shirt hadn't been quite perfect enough and Dean had a small growth of white downy feathers along his side, but when Sam tried to apologize Dean hadn't let him say anything at all.

By the time John showed up, a week later than he said he'd be, Sam and Dean had cleaned themselves up and John didn't seem the wiser. They moved, Sam sprawled sleeping in the backseat of the Impala, quieter than he'd ever been before as they travelled across the country. They enrolled in school for another year, and the summer that Sam spent in silence was never really mentioned, though whenever Sam caught sight of the feathers that Dean pulled from his skin regrowing, Dean would hold Sam against him and they would sit in silence for a few hours.


End file.
